There are trials wherein a man is judged, and others wherein an entire colony stands trial through him. That of Louis-Philibert-François Rouxel de Blanchelande, ci-devant maréchal de camp and lieutenant-governor of the French Leeward Islands, belonged to the latter kind. Before the Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal, established at the Palais de Justice by the decree of 10 March 1793 to judge conspirators without appeal, it was the whole of Saint-Domingue that came forward to testify.
Citizen Hugues was the first to speak of the sea. He had been charged with superintending the fitting out of two vessels, the Agathe and the Castor, dispatched to meet a certain Borel, the newly appointed commander of the National Guard. He had formally requisitioned Captain Grimoard to ensure their safe arrival; Grimoard had promised obedience, provided that the warrants were not headed with the words “in the name of the Nation and the Law.” Then, instead of shielding Borel, he had arrested him upon the open sea alongside his companions and carried him prisoner to Saint-Marc. Blanchelande, declared the witness, approved this conduct by letter.
Next came the image preserved by the Gazette: the governor’s arrival before Port-au-Prince with two ships of the line and two frigates, and his triumphant entry into the town amidst a general staff whose hats were adorned with yellow and green cockades. The witness recounted also the death of a patriot named Praloto.
The accused replied without losing his composure. He was reproached with having sanctioned the decrees of the Colonial Assembly; yet how could it be made a crime to have approved the deliberations of the people’s representatives in the colony? As for the cockades, he had never worn any save the tricolour, and he challenged the witness to prove that his officers had ever sported others.
Augustin-Jean Bruley, planter and commissioner for the colony, proved far more terrible. Praloto, he testified, had been sent to Saint-Marc, a town that harboured the most mortal enemies of the Revolution; “the event hath justified the perfidious machinations of this General,” he added: the wretched man had been hacked to pieces with his own weapons and cast into the sea.
Then Bruley, mayor of the parish of Grande-Rivière, recounted the ten months’ war he had waged. The rebel chieftains, he maintained, raised the cry of “Long live the King!”, styled themselves generals of the King’s armies, and wore the Cross of Saint-Louis; one among them, Jean-François, sported a royal blue sash and a ribbon of satin bearing the legend “Long live the King of France!” The governor, he claimed, had eight thousand men under his command, and instead of containing the uprising upon the plains, had suffered it to gain the mountains. He described the massacres in words one does not transcribe.
And suddenly, in the midst of the hearing, the deponent unfurled a banner: that of the National Guard of Dondon, captured by the insurgents, and retaken from them by a commander of dragoons from Le Cap. Upon it, the words “the Nation, the Law” had been effaced, leaving only “Long live the King.” The jurors examined it.
The issue of the Gazette breaks off there, in the midst of the tale of war. One is left contemplating that white-cravatted standard, passed from hand to hand within a chamber of the Palais, two thousand leagues from the mornes over which it had flown, and confronted by a question the trial posed without ever resolving: of which revolution was Saint-Domingue dying?
Gazette des nouveaux tribunaux, 1793, Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal of Paris, trial of Louis-Philibert-François Rouxel de Blanchelande.